It’s Party Time!! Right click on the link BELOW to listen to / download the recording of the “Overcoming Procrastination – Should you?” call held on Thursday, Aug 20th. ——–> episode1-overcoming-procrastination <————- Happy Listening!
I took baby steps towards my own Garden of Eden and came up with a special, FREE call just for YOU on Kicking Procrastination’s Bee-Hind (and should you even try?). It only took me 9 months to get down to it 😉
Question: Why do you put off things that are important to you ?
Is it a habit that is counterproductive, needless and delaying and leads to stress, guilt, loss of productivity and more procrastination?
Or is it telling you something isn’t that important to you?
Some of the reasons we put things off are that we don’t know where to start, are afraid of failure, perfectionists, lack discipline – motivation – knowledge -skills – focus, think it’s too big or time consuming a task, stressed out, not sure of the first or next step to take, and inertia.
Do you get so overwhelmed that not doing it is the easier choice? And yet when you finally get started on it, you wish you hadn’t wasted all that time procrastinating..?
Here’s what Procrastination is NOT:
– It’s not a Time Management issue
– Or about Planning
– Or as trivial or harmless as you may think
– Or as bad as you may think 😉
– Surprised hey?
Do you tell yourself “I’ll do this tomorrow, that’s when I’ll be more productive” or “I work well under pressure so I’ll just leave it till the last minute” or “I’ll just finish what I’m doing, then I’ll be able to focus on this pressing issue”?
Would you rather have yourself and others think that you don’t have the time, instead of admitting fears around your ability to do something?
Many procrastinators act (or don’t act) out of fear of failure or pressure to perform, lack focus and find the perfect distraction in checking email zillions of times times a day and doing other unimportant chores.
And then get all anxious about the time they wasted on email and those unimportant things.
How do I know?
Well, you’re looking at one.
Who still “struggles” with this but is finding ways to work around it and waste less time in the process, increase productivity and be happier all around!
In my search for answers, a question that came to me was:
What if Procrastination was actually serving a purpose!? What if it’s not the big, evil habit we make it out to be?
This warranted some looking into. An interesting discussion followed. For the details, scroll back up and click the link to listen in. Thank you to the amazing people who were on the call and in the chat room, you made it fun!
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I’m thinking… that I should’ve been on that call! Ahem.
You made a few points (a la questions) that surprised me … surprised me to recognize that it’s apparently more prevalent that I’d thought. I mean, how did you know I thought my tendency to procrastinate had so many subtle-yet-secret thoughts?!
Dang. Will you be posting an mp3 of the call?
Living it right this moment,
Anna
Annaaaaaaaa! Haha Ask and You Shall Receive. I’m uploading the call right now.
It was my 1st ever public tele-call and I wanted to make sure the tech stuff would work well so I got on 15 min early and that’s 15 min of me saying “hello can you hear me” and breathing. LOL.
But an awesome friend Annette ‘cleaned’ it up for me an got rid of the 1st 15 min, yay! Would love your take on it so please come back and share your thoughts on the big P with us. Thanks!
ps: Link is embedded in the 2nd para of the post!
Thanks. Good theoretical & practical points by all, and easy to listen to. Everyone was thoughtful. If it was a group of six guys I think it’d be very likely there would have been a much more”prescriptive” tone. It is a subtle thing, isn’t it.
I listened while doing a “secondary task” (dishes) because I was having difficulty starting on my A-list item for the day. I’d forgotten about the timer trick.
Your mic was either misplaced or of poor quality, making it harder to hear you than the other participants.
Thanks bunches for the feedback Adrian! Appreciate you taking the time and effort to do so. Glad you found the tips to be useful, wanted to make sure there was a practical aspect to the call rather then just a lot of talk.
And you’re right, my mic is going downhill, I need a new and better one. I was also using skype to call in rather than a landline so that didn’t help much. Time to bust out the pennies and get a home phone maybe :)?